dan_m2k

This makes me really happy to see this non social media, non algo part of the internet going from strength to strength.

Having deleted my socials and regained some time, I’ve just got a small skeleton of the sites I used to read left in my phone’s favourites.

Despite all the wrongs of Facebook, et al, I have lost some channels and stories that I used to consume there.

How do users of readers like NNW discover new stuff? Just picking stuff up or do the apps support discovery?

A really good read. I was a bit later to the party but, my God, it was better then.

But the reality of shareholder value and developers salaries had to come from somewhere, and here we are, the enshittification of the internet is upon us and you can’t even load a HTML document without being tracked, spammed and generally frustrated.

Started a challenger media business, still stressy, but I have purpose and I have much more satisfaction in life

An interesting retrospective and nice to read, though I had to chuckle at "soft" discs. Is 'floppy' now considered offensive?

I started my web dev career when MSIE was accelerating and achieved crazy levels of dominance. Developing for IE was shit. I mean, I was never out of work, but the wasted time figuring out which quirk you were coding around was, frankly, ridiculous when you look back on it. But you had an arsenal of workarounds and techniques which that generation of developer fantastic problem-solvers and have lots of initiative.

Despite how they did it, it is essential that nobody in or around the industry forgets how good MSIE was for mainstream adoption of the internet/www. It literally made it so that everyone was online. This was when the beige box in the corner was your window to the www and very few people had that kind of connectivity in their pocket.

Reflecting on how MS achieved dominance and then essentially backburnered MSIE development really befuddles me to this day. Some of the thoughts in the comments make sense; Was it arrogance and MS seriously thought Win32/.NET would remain dominant? Or simply that they'd dropped the ball in other departments and had to redeploy resources to a profit centre?

Fucking good.

No idea, but I bet the brand equity created for the MSN brand via MSN messenger was indeed huge across a boatload of international markets.

Seems like a huge amount of wasted traction and momentum for the generation that grew up on MSN messenger, and now might be making purchase decisions where that traction could've been leveraged. It's what any other (non tech) brands do very successfully.

I saw someone repost something from msn.com the other day, and was genuinely surprised to see it was still live.

But, the way that the brand was migrated

   MSN Messenger -> Windows Live Messenger -> Bing (?) -> etc etc 

A nice little slice of internet history.

True is the lesson that scale doesn’t represent success. I wonder how many of the current tech companies will learn the same lesson, or have we reached a period of maturity where products that don’t contribute to the bottom line aren’t allowed to linger like this did?

Yeah. Hackneys weren't great, but ubiquitous and convenient in London (even if it was like travelling in blender).

Mini cabs were/are ass, in every UK city, and they deserved to get disrupted.

And the net effect is that the whole market had to compete for it's market share again, which meant a better experience for the customer overall.

I laugh when I encounter a super local minicab service that has maybe a half dozen drivers, you book them by phone, radios them to go to pickups and still only take cash. Who are ordering these jalopies? Meanwhile, anyone serious has an app, contactless payment/prepayment and real time ETA. Much better.

Property portfolios = people paying your pension one day.

I’m so pleased that someone isn’t afraid to reject the WFH kool aid.

Just because certain personality types work better in solitude doesn’t mean it’s one-size-fits-all.

Others are suffering loneliness, marginalisation, are struggling inside their own heads, are stuck in tiny apartments or don’t have access to outdoor space. If you hate the office that badly, you’re probably working at the wrong place.

And yeah, a truly creative collaborative working environment can’t be replicated over video call.

I use the Dyson on my Mac’s exhaust every so often for the same reason, it’s satisfying to see the amount of crud that comes out of it.

I can’t believe I got hooked in by that deceptive, clickbaity headline. Am I on the ExpressOnline and didn’t realise?!

I call bs. It was a very clever entry to the market with lots of opportunity for product improvement. 3G chip? Reason to upgrade. App Store? Another.

Good piece, and nice to see a local lad on here. waves from Park Square

As to your colleague, thank you. If I can be of any help in helping identify where support went wrong, please hit me up.

Despite the issues with support, I’m pleased to report how Stripe’s engineering team understood, took ownership and resolved this nasty little bug as it turned out.

I couldn’t believe a dev-friendly and sane org like stripe would intentionally remove functionality so haphazardly.

The resolution is the result of some good folk at Stripe and hopefully the feedback will improve support and escalation. ^DM

Postman is a decent stop gap, thanks for the suggestion

Trying to click through to this piece from HN on Facebook tells me this link is malicious. Sour grapes on FB’s part?

FYI, my new 13in MBP went back after 9 days because of failed/stuck keys :(

Yep. I'm right there with you. I thought the new mac had an issue loading webpages. Turns out I was involuntarily cancelling navigation with ESC all the bloody time.

Yep, my 6S had a goosed battery, walked into the Apple Store and 15min later I had a new phone with a predictable battery (and a headphone jack, happy times)

If you're having an affair or doing pretty much anything that you might not want people to know you're doing, there are a hundred and one ways for people to find you. Users aren't dumb. They know by the email receipt coming into their inbox complete with map that their movements are tracked. And they make a choice either way that suits their requirements or convenience. Having an affair? Get a cab and pay cash. Or take the risk. Personal choice, after all.

Uber might be a questionable company with questionable people in charge (referring to 'boob-er' by Travis Kalanick for one), but they're just flawed people, as apparently is the author with his quite childish style and apparent lack of reality or commercials.

Near me, Uber has made the previously shitty private hire cab industry up it's game, with more drivers and an app experience a bit like Uber. But, let's be clear. Uber probably weren't the first in this space, they're the ones that went out there, got funding, hired some smart people and delivered a good product and platform. And they existed because the industry, globally was pretty shitty, and bits of it still are. The good thing is that the consumer has choice.

And the calls in the comments that the platform should be free and open is lovely and idealistic. But do the talented engineers, designers and whoever else that works to make a well put together and scalable platform not deserve good pay for a job well done?

As a fair disclosure, I write, admire, build on-top-of free software and platforms when it meets my needs. I write this on a Mac, which also meets my needs. Choice exists and we're all leveraging it.

Great explanation

After failure of my startup's first iteration, investigation and data made it clear my cofounder was at fault:

- deals that made a loss - poor relationship management - investing way too much in blaming the team around her

This ended up with a company seriously in the red, heading to liquidation and a completely fucked reputation.

Iteration two: flying solo, small team and 18 months in, we are in profit and I've fixed most of the relationships that needed some help.

I have a department head who I can trust and points out my blindspots but never wanted to be a founder, which is fine.

Be very careful your cofounder isn't just saying the right things in the hope of a payday.

Meh, at some point we've gotta see this as a trade off. And do you know something, I'm really not that concerned that .gov knows my browsing history.

Not as vintage as this, but back in '10, I, along with a couple of other freelancers that I'd worked with in the past got asked to work in a <legacy clothing manufacturer> in a big, old mill in Yorkshire.

We were immediately isolated from the modern-ish IT department and placed in a room at the end of the mill that contained a couple of dozen vacuum drive tape machines. So loud that they silenced the room when they were warming up.

Our task was to "check for security problems" in their ecommerce platform because there was some serious financial motivation from the men upstairs.

Their 'platform' was a decade-ish old install of osCommerce that had been hacked to death to make it support multi-side and multi language, together with some customisations to it's templating engine to provide asset reuse across sites.

It was immediately apparent that all the SQL injection and most other vulnerabilities present years ago in that old version of OSc were still there. They were alongside the many, many vulns that were introduced with the hacks. Oh, and most of the hacks were done by a mixture of programmers on the continent, so variable names and comments were easy to understand.

They didn't want to even consider upgrading, just patch it up and get outta there.

Out of professionalism it was necessary to document the many times management passed on our recommendations to fix issues we found. Looking through that file, most of those issues seem to be present even today.

Larger question, not just confined to the world of iOS ad blocking; as the creator of ad-blocking code, are you at all concerned that you're hurting the only revenue stream for sites that rely on ad revenue to pay the bills?

We're not just talking the big boys here, a bunch of indie content producers publish online and I don't begrudge them a few ad dollars for producing content that's worth reading, or is it that we're making the call that content should be free or is inherently value-less?

It's smooth on my iPad 1 / ios5 / Safari. And that's saying something, it cries with trello and anything client heavy.